Which CivFanatics are involved with Civ V?

[CanuckSoldier]

I could see what your saying, all though I, personally have no problems with writing long reports (in fact, I used to play an online game where that was the majority of what i did. It was called tribalwars, pretty fun if you are a leader like I was perfecting your tribe) I could see how that could annoy people once they get a beta version of the game. I agree with you and although I have never tested a game myself I would assume that testing more for people who want to fix things then want to play the game early. Do they do anything to prevent people from just testing to play and not offering suggestions?, because I know I would be ticke if I was just giving out free copies of the my game.

Well the developers know that they can't expect a 40hr work week from free community testers and that some people join the test with the best of intentions and then real life comes along and derails them, such as the birth of a child or something. Which is why 2K and Firaxis have their own in house QA to insure that a minimum standard is maintained. Although in the past I would say that the free testers have contributed eminsely to both finding bugs and recommending gameplay changes that significantly improved the game for everyone. After all we are all huge fans of the series, were as the inhouse testers may have gaming backgrounds in other games, they are not likely TBS experts and are following a QA sheet that tells them what they have to test and evaluate.

But since you likely were invited to test because some other tester or former tester recommended you strongly, if it turns out that you didn't live upto those expectations, it's likely that friend of yours is not going to put you at the top of his/her list again. Reputations are important to many of us in the Civ community after all.

And yes I've even invited key members of the community in the past, people I thought had what it takes to learn to test a game. And found out that for some people it is not easy to switch from being a competitive gamer to being a QA tester, while some things are common there are many differences in the skill sets of these groups.

CS

 

[Gamemaster77]

But since you likely were invited to test because some other tester or former tester recommended you strongly, if it turns out that you didn't live upto those expectations, it's likely that friend of yours is not going to put you at the top of his/her list again. Reputations are important to many of us in the Civ community after all.

Your not talking to me specifically are you? That's because I've never been recomended, I only recently joined the online civ community a little less than a year ago. I also always try to keep a good rep when people give me privs whether in games or RL. Btw why does QA stand for?

 

[warpstorm]

QA = Quality Assurance

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Your not talking to me specifically are you? That's because I've never been recomended, I only recently joined the online civ community a little less than a year ago. I also always try to keep a good rep when people give me privs whether in games or RL. Btw why does QA stand for?

No I was just posting for the benifit of all the readers here. Not aimed at anything you have or have not done specifically

CS

 

[Gamemaster77]

No I was just posting for the benifit of all the readers here. Not aimed at anything you have or have not done specifically

CS

Okay it's just that you quoted me. I was like what the heck? What is he talking about. So QA testers are the paid ones? I'm just wondering I'm pretty interested in this kind of subject.

 

[Duuk]

Having beta tested several games for Paradox and (likely) soon to be adding some Blizzard beta testing, I can definitely tell you that most of you DON'T want to be beta testers. You want to play CivV early.

When you get home from an 8 or 10 hour workday, login to your beta site and see the daily patch notes as "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances, please test" and know you're going to spend the next hour using various scenario setups to try to crash the game doing that, you'll find there is a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT, but not necessarily a sense of FUN.

...especially when the daily patch notes the next day say, "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances (for real this time)".

 

[strollen]

Having beta tested several games for Paradox and (likely) soon to be adding some Blizzard beta testing, I can definitely tell you that most of you DON'T want to be beta testers. You want to play CivV early.

When you get home from an 8 or 10 hour workday, login to your beta site and see the daily patch notes as "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances, please test" and know you're going to spend the next hour using various scenario setups to try to crash the game doing that, you'll find there is a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT, but not necessarily a sense of FUN.

...especially when the daily patch notes the next day say, "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances (for real this time)".

On my limited and old experience as a Beta tester for a few games. I think you are exactly right. You get a lot of requests to do stuff that isn't fun but important. Beta testing is a lot like playing the 1.0 version of a game, from a company with much lower quality standard than Firaxis.

That said I encourage all of you who want to do it to go for it, and please play the heck of the game,and help find all of the bugs long before Fall of 2010.

 

[MeteorPunch]

Having beta tested several games for Paradox and (likely) soon to be adding some Blizzard beta testing, I can definitely tell you that most of you DON'T want to be beta testers. You want to play CivV early.

When you get home from an 8 or 10 hour workday, login to your beta site and see the daily patch notes as "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances, please test" and know you're going to spend the next hour using various scenario setups to try to crash the game doing that, you'll find there is a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT, but not necessarily a sense of FUN.

...especially when the daily patch notes the next day say, "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances (for real this time)".

Those kind of things are usually done by paid testers in house. Public beta testing is to create a large pool to find things that the paid testers missed.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Having beta tested several games for Paradox and (likely) soon to be adding some Blizzard beta testing, I can definitely tell you that most of you DON'T want to be beta testers. You want to play CivV early.

When you get home from an 8 or 10 hour workday, login to your beta site and see the daily patch notes as "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances, please test" and know you're going to spend the next hour using various scenario setups to try to crash the game doing that, you'll find there is a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT, but not necessarily a sense of FUN.

...especially when the daily patch notes the next day say, "Fixed the AI diplomacy to not CTD on vassalization requests when at war with multiple alliances (for real this time)".

I agree it is quit often not fun but alot of work, in the end it is very rewarding to see your name in the game credits and know that you contributed to the games success. Sometimes it is fun, like beating on the dev's in a test MP game But in general it's more work than fun.

And if interested in a carreer in game development Firaxis did post some interesting articles on what qualifications will get you into the industry and how you should be approaching a game industry career.

http://www.firaxis.com/jobs/career.php

Also just reading their bio's can give you some insight.

http://www.firaxis.com/company/bios_home.php

CS

 

[Dale]

I remember one of the strangest requests we got from Soren for Civ4 vanilla testing, was testing the mouse-click queue. He told us to go click crazy on the interface and time how long it takes to crash the interface.

Sometimes it's fun, but mostly testing is tedious, boring, and of course frustrating.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Here's your 1%. Alex doesn't work for Firaxis anymore, Sid is creative director so he oversees all projects at an executive level not a project level (Jon Shafer and whoever is Producer is calling the shots on Civ5) and Elizabeth works for 2K as public relations, so probably copy/pastes what she's emailed.

Yes apparently Alex has moved over to Scaleform as the Lead Software Engineer, I hope he is doing well and enjoying his new job.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alex-mantzaris/4/862/4a7

CS

 

[Gamemaster77]

It must be alot work. So you guys do stuff like starting random scenerios to find different bugs and just doing everything you can to make the game crash? I used to do the same thing with random tiny scenerios all the time (although obviuosly not to find bugs ) in C3C. Although I did try to find why my music would sometimes randomly shut off since apparently no one in the forum new why either.

 

[Solver]

You also have to realize that "beta testing" is a bit of a misnomer. In software development, beta refers to a version that is being tested by external testers but it has the major features implemented and mostly working. In gaming terms, when you see public beta testing, that typically means that yes, the actual software is in beta phase.

With closed testing like with Civ, there's actually a bunch of community testers that participates before beta and even before alpha. That was the case with Civ4 and you can't really say that they only use community beta-testers, as it's actually also alpha-testers and pre-alpha testers even.

What this means is that yes, as others have said, testing is a VERY different thing from getting to play the game early. Until it reaches beta, you will usually not even be able to complete an entire game without suffering game-ending crashes or bugs. So of course some people find it's hard to adjust, as they don't cope well with crashes, missing features, etc.

As for public testing, I think it's a great idea for multiplayer-oriented games. Done after the actual software is in beta and thus reasonably stable, you need feedback from a wide range (a few hundred people at least) of players to see what's balanced, what units people enjoy, what the average perception of game difficulty is, etc.

 

[Gamemaster77]

Whoa there is even pre-Alpha testing done? That must be alot of work.

 

[deanej]

If the process for civ5 is the same as for civ4, then testing has been done since day 1. The development of civ4 was driven based on the experince of the developers actually playing the game, so debugging had to be done from day 1.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Yes by the time I was playing the released version of civ4 I had a hard time remembering what mechanics, UU, etc were in the game and what ones were dropped or totally modified and I was still remembering them ;p.

Made the first few weeks interesting anyway ;p

CS

 

[Gamemaster77]

Yes by the time I was playing the released version of civ4 I had a hard time remembering what mechanics, UU, etc were in the game and what ones were dropped or totally modified and I was still remembering them ;p.

Made the first few weeks interesting anyway ;p

CS

Thats funny. I can imagine if i was playing I would be like "What the heck, how did my longbow not kill that warrior. Oh ya, archers are defensive, not offensive.

 

[Solver]

Been there with civics. Civ4 civics had more changes than you could count, I think everyone in the testing group got mixed up with them at some points.

 

[Gamemaster77]

One thing I don't get is, how do you get testers before the release is announced if you don't want anyone too know about it? Would if they say no?

 

[Dale]

Internal referee to the devs. That's how it worked for Civ4. 95% of us were referred (probably by multiple internal people) to the devs. The other 5% would've been hand picked by the devs themselves.